Family Matters, Week of 10-29-06

Every week I write about my family. Welcome to it.

Annie (4yr old Machineist)

Annie's imagination has officially taken off. Whenever she watches a cartoon or virtually any television show, she's right there with a game attached.

Currently she (and Abby) are enamored with Go Diego, Go!, the sister show (or would that be brother show?) to Dora the Explorer. They love both, but I think the edge goes to Diego. His show is a bit more exciting and features different animals.

And you know what that means--as soon as the show is over, whatever animal was in trouble is soon on our living room floor, just waiting to be rescued.

Lately she's taken to running around the house calling herself Baby Jaguar (an animal helper on the show) and I'm Daddy Jaguar.

Then I roar and the girls run squealing. It's cute, I tell ya.

As for Halloween, she absolutely rocked as a Southern Belle (though we eventually gave her the Scarlett O'Hara moniker) and got more compliments than basically any trick or treater I've ever seen. Ever. Yeah.

Abby (2yr old Beauty)

Abigail has officially had it with her sister. Not that they don't love one another, but for some reason Annie gets great pleasure in pushing Abby around. Typical sister stuff, sure, but as a parent it's frustrating. Annie's been punished innumerable times for this sort of behavior, yet it continues.

Ugh.

Anyway, otherwise Abby is doing better and we're still working on getting her out of The Pull-Up Cycle. Ericka finally laid down the hammer on the babysitting situation: Come the first of the year, it ends. And while I know it's 'putting them out', at the same time I think we'll gain a lot of peace (and undrawn-on walls) from it.

Abby also did a stellar job at Halloween, only needing help when her cute basket was overloaded with candy. Dad, of course, was happy to help.

Ericka (her myspace)

Remember when I hinted at that family emergency last Friday? Well, Ericka's mother took a tumble on the steps in my apartment building and shattered her Tibia, knee, and fractured her shinbone. All in all, extremely bad stuff. She's out of commission for 8 weeks and is currently in a nursing home...which she hates, of course, as all nursing homes suck.

So right now Ericka's freaking out about her mother and I'm mr. insensitive as I don't get very emotional about...anything. Sure I can act emotional, but overall I simply don't get very excited about much. I try to empathize and explain that her mother will be fine--all things in time. Accidents happen. Bleh.

Etc.

On another bad news note, my friends over at AtomicTumor are having their own bout of hospital-induced scariness, where words like "serious", "life threatening" and "septic shock" are being banted around.

Scary words. Threatening words. Or, as the south may call them, fightin' words.

I'm ready to throw down the next guy who uses "life threatening" in regards to my family members.

"So, based on this analysis," the doc says, "we have this life threatening--whoa, whoa what the fu--" *KRA-SLAM*

See?

Have a great (and safe, and healthy) weekend, peeps.

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